Dynamics AX in the Cloud : Possibilities and Shortcomings

Sammanfattning: The usage of the cloud is rapidly increasing and is something that is of large interest to everyone involved in technology. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the benefits and possible shortcomings of using Microsoft Dynamics AX in the cloud, specifically Microsoft Azure, instead of using local datacenters. This thesis project has been done at Scania IT using their implementation of Dynamics AX. This thesis project consists of an extensive literature study regarding both ERP Systems as well as other systems in regards to the cloud. It was decided early on to focus on the new version of Dynamics AX, which currently is only available in the cloud and compare this implementation to the two versions that the majority are using today, AX 2009 and AX 2012. The benefits of AX and Azure both being Microsoft products are clear with the welldesigned integrations and support all the way through the clients to the servers regarding backups and load balancing. It is shown how the developers have to work differently in regards to integrations with outside systems, especially in regards to AX 2009 with the frameworks having changed. The addition of Data Entities mean that the developers can save a lot of time by only needing a reference to the location of the object in the database instead of having to keep track of all the tables themselves. The analysis focuses on the differences in four different areas, performance & accessibility, scalability, cost savings as well as security & privacy. The background knowledge that is being used for the analysis primarily comes from the literature study as well as knowledge gained by studying the implementation at Scania today. The result shows that there are clear advantages regarding performance, cost savings and especially accessibility, however it is also clear that laws in a lot of countries still have not caught up with the fact that it is possible to use the cloud for data storage these days. Which in turn means that the best move in the near future for the majority of ERP users would be either a hybrid or private cloud within the borders of the same country.